Prince Henry the Navigator

When the great age of exploration opened in the late 15th Century, the men who would traverse the vast oceans to discover new worlds owed much to a Portuguese royal born over a century before who likely never undertook a voyage himself. Prince Henry the Navigator, as he is called, built the tools and developed the techniques that would take European explorers around the world, changing forever the course of human civilization.

Prince Henry was born in 1394, the fourth son of King John I of Portugal and his Queen, Philippa, a daughter of the English royal John of Gaunt. In 1415, Prince Henry commanded the army that took the Moorish town of Ceuta, just across Gibraltar in North Africa and was knighted for that exploit. Ceuta had been a base for Moorish pirates and had been the port where many captured Christians began their lives as slaves.

The Ceuta Campaign sparked Prince Henry's curiosity of unknown lands. Between stories told by liberated Christian prisoners and the capture of more accurate maps, Prince Henry had a better idea of what lay beyond the known world at the time.

The Portuguese long had an interest in Atlantic trade. Prince Henry saw that the Moors in Ceuta had commerce in many rich goods from the African hinterland and beyond, including precious metals, silks, and spices. Prince Henry's interest in exploration was sparked by a desire to get a share of that trade. Exploration of Africa by land was impossible, due to the terrain and Moorish opposition. So Prince Henry decided on a policy of ocean exploration, going around the Moorish occupied territory in effect.

To that purpose, Prince Henry started what was in effect the Apollo program of his era, setting up an academy for navigators, map-makers, and ship wrights in the coastal town of Sagres. There was also a naval arsenal and an observatory located there. The nearby harbor of Lagos provided an excellent jumping off point for the voyages of discovery sponsored by Prince Henry.

One of the supreme accomplishments of Prince Henry's academy was the development of the ocean going caravel, a ship that combined the square rigging common at the time in European vessels with the lateen sails favored by the Moors, giving it both speed and maneuverability. The caravel could sail upwind, necessary for exploring south around the coast of Africa. Without the caravel, deep ocean voyages of exploration would have been all but impossible.

Prince Henry also helped to perfect the art of navigation and cartography. Experts gathered at his academy helped to advance geographic knowledge by leaps and bounds.

Prince Henry sponsored a series of voyages of exploration, using the new ocean going caravel. The goal was to sail south of Cape Bojador, a headland in the north part of the Western Sahara, beyond which no European had sailed in two thousand years, mainly due to the violent seas in the vicinity.

The first attempt, undertaken by João Gonçalves Zarco, ended in failure in 1419. Zarco did, however, discover the island of Porto Santo during that voyage, as well as the island of Madeira along with Tristão Vaz Teixeira and Bartolomeu Perestrelo during a subsequent voyage in 1420. Along with the Azores, discovered ten years later, these islands became Portuguese colonies and important stopping off points for subsequent voyages of discovery.

Finally, Gil Eanes sailed south of Cape Bojador in 1434 and returned, having discovered a safe route. This opened up the ocean further south. Baldaya reached Rio de Oro in 1436, Tristão Cape Blanco in 1441, and Dinis Diaz Cape Verde in 1445. By this time, Prince Henry's explorers had passed the southern extent of the desert. The Moorish trade routes across the Sahara had been circumnavigated. Trade in gold and slaves began and wealth poured into Portuguese coffers.

Meanwhile, Prince Henry undertook a disastrous expedition to take the Moorish town of Tangiers in 1437. The Portuguese were defeated and Prince Henry's younger brother Ferdinand was captured by the Moors. Prince Henry subsequently confined his activities to sponsoring exploration.

Sometime in the 1450s, the Cape Verde islands were discovered, possibly by Antonio Noli. By 1460, the year of Prince Henry's death, the Portuguese had reached as far as present day Sierra-Leone.

After Prince Henry's death, voyages of exploration continued unabated. Between 1469 and 1474, all trade with Africa was given as a monopoly to Fernao Gomes, who in exchange had to discover 600 km of coastline a year. During his time, the African coast was explored to just south of the equator. After the contract with Gomes ended, voyages of discovery became the responsibility of the crown again, and in 1482, Diogo Cão was sent out. He discovered the Congo River, and reached Cape Santa Maria.

On a second voyage in 1485, he got even further south, to present-day Namibia. In 1487, Bartolomeu Diaz was sent out for a further voyage along the African coast. He got in a storm, and when it ended steered east again, but did not find the coast. He had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope without seeing it. He explored the south coast up to Algoa Bay, and on the way back discovered the Cape of Good Hope. Then, in 1497, Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached India, opening up for Portugal a ocean route to the silks and spices of the East Indies.

In the meantime, a Genovese Captain named Christopher Columbus, in the employ of the Spanish Crown, using the kind of ships developed by Prince Henry's shipwrights and using the navigation techniques perfected by the Prince's navigators, undertook to find a western ocean route to the Indies. He did not find that route, but instead discovered a New World across the Western Ocean, which we now call America.